The Universe Might Be A Hologram

A meteor (L) from the Geminids meteor shower enters the Earth's atmosphere past the stars Castor and Pollux (two bright stars, R) on December 12, 2009 above Southold, New York. This meteor shower gets the name "Geminids" because it appears to radiate from the constellation Gemini. Geminids are pieces of debris from an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. Earth runs into a stream of debris from the object every year in mid-December, causing the meteors. The peak of the shower is expected the night of December 13-14 at about 0500 GMT on December 14. AFP PHOTO/Stan Honda (Photo credit should read STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images)

File photo of Asteroid 2103 TV135. (STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images)

TAMPA, Fla. (CBS Tampa) – A team of physicists has found evidence that the Universe could be a huge hologram.

According to Nature, a journal dedicated to science, physicists have “compelling” evidence that demonstrates how the universe is a projection from a lower-dimensional universe. Their theory can be likened to what a hologram on a credit card is like.

Physicist Juan Maldacena first proposed a controversial model in 1997, but it didn’t garner much attention. Now, Japanese physicists tested a mathematical model different from his original model that could render the theory to be true.

According to the article in Nature, Maldacena’s model suggests that the universe exists in nine dimensions of space and one of time. He proposed that gravity in the universe comes from thin, vibrating strings that are holograms of events that take place in simpler, flatter cosmos.

The Japanese researchers’ principle claims that data containing a description of a volume of space could be hidden in a region of this flattened, version of the universe.

The theory suggests in a larger sense that the entire universe can be seen as a “two-dimensional structure projected onto a cosmological horizon.” Meaning that objects would be stored as a fragment of data rather than a physical object in existence.

Two separate papers by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan help to prove Maldacena’s theory true.

“In one paper, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence,” the Nature journal article noted. “In the other, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.”

Maldacena stated that the calculations seem to be correct helping to prove his theory about the universe.